


Putting the "Romance" back in "Necromancer"

by Milieu



Category: Bandom, Black Veil Brides
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Humor, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 00:56:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5765524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milieu/pseuds/Milieu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, you've got to question your life choices. Such as when you wake up to find the stranger that you brought home for a casual hookup has tied you up in your kitchen and is about to perform witchcraft or some bullshit like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Putting the "Romance" back in "Necromancer"

If Jake got through tonight alive, he was never playing wingman for Ashley ever again.

It had all started out normally enough. Ashley had zeroed in on a guy at the club and sidled up to Jake and was like, "You see that tall guy over there?" and Jake was like "Over there?" and Ashley was like "No, over there. With the eyes." and Jake was just drunk enough for that to not make sense because all the guys in the club had eyes, but he saw the guy Ashley was gesturing towards and was like "Okay, what about him?" and Ashley said, "Go distract his friend for a few minutes."

All he ever asked for was "a few minutes", and apparently that was enough time to get the job done because Jake almost never saw the dudes Ashley went after until the next morning or later once he'd made a move. People had joked that Ashley was magic when it came to getting into someone's pants.

Jake was pretty sure that after tonight, he never wanted to hear magic mentioned ever again.

"Are you uncomfortable? Want some water or something?" Jinxx asked. (That wasn't his real name, he'd helpfully informed Jake. Jake supposed he understood why Jinxx wasn't in the business of giving out his real name now.)

Jake shifted in his chair. "Yeah, I'm uncomfortable, and no, I don't want a drink." Water would be nice, actually, since waking up to find himself tied to a chair in his kitchen had done his approaching hangover no favors, but he wasn't keen on accepting anything Jinxx gave him now. Not that Jinxx had drugged him in the first place, unless there was some new way to drug someone via sex that Jake hadn't been told about, but he might as well play it as safe as possible considering the position he was in.

It could not be emphasized enough that that position was tied to a kitchen chair in his underwear while Jinxx drew some kind of circle on the floor with chalk. Now that he thought about it, the fact that Jinxx had been stone-cold sober and so easily offered to drive them back to Jake's place should have been a red flag, as should all of the junk that had been rattling around in the trunk of Jinxx's car. And all of the occult symbols, which Jake had taken to be either ironic or some kind of gothy affectation and now realized were probably neither. And the oversized rug that had been rolled up in the backseat, which was now sitting on the floor next to Jake's kitchen table and probably waiting for Jake's body to be rolled up in it and dumped somewhere once Jinxx was through with whatever he was doing here. And how Jinxx had seemed more interested when Jake mentioned that his neighbors were out of town and there would be nobody around to possibly overhear them.

...Yeah, Jake had some judgment issues when the prospect of getting laid was on the line. He could admit that.

The sex was good, though. Would have made up for the more negative aspects of a hookup, if those negative aspects had been anything other than "is probably going to ritually murder me".

"What's that supposed to be, anyway?" He finally asked, indicating Jinxx's chalk drawing with a nod of his head. He had a vague idea about distracting him, or maybe trying to talk his way out of his soon-to-be sacrificial murder, but mostly he was bored. Confusion and cursing Ashley's name for getting him into this only took up so much time.

Jinxx simply said, "Magic circle," and continued drawing weird symbols around the edges of it. It wasn't at all what Jake had wanted to hear, but at the same time it was more or less what he'd expected. It was clear by this point that Jinxx was more than a little crazy, and Jake could only imagine what his friend from the club was doing with Ashley right about now-

Ashley.

_Fuck._

He hadn't seen Ashley before he and Jinxx had left the club. He'd barely even thought about him since then except to mentally gripe at him, and while Jake was pretty sure that he couldn't be blamed considering his situation, the realization that he'd left Ashley all alone with someone who at least had the potential to also be a knife-wielding maniac sent a cold, unpleasant shock through him.

(Did he mention that Jinxx had a knife? Because Jinxx had a knife. It was sitting on the floor next to his circle, one of those ornate daggers that you usually only saw in museums. He hadn't used it yet, or even threatened to, but its presence was another glaring reminder of how fucked up this whole thing was.)

Oh god, they were both going to die. They were going to get murdered by occultists all because Ashley was horny and some Boy Scout troop was going to find Jake's body rolled up in a rug somewhere downstream and he was in his  _underwear_ -

"You doing okay? You're pretty pale." Jinxx was sitting back on his heels, having evidently finished his "magic circle", and was regarding Jake with a look of concern.

Jake stared at him in disbelief. "No, I am not  _doing_ _okay_. I bring a guy home for the first time in months, and the next thing I know he's got me tied up in the kitchen and is about to stab me over some kind of fucking magic circle, and how would any of this be 'okay'!?" His composure was beginning to crack as the full reality of the situation hit him.

"I'm not going to  _stab_ you." Jinxx looked mildly affronted by the accusation. "I just need to draw a little bit of blood, is all."

"Why!?" Come to think of it, maybe that should have been the first question Jake asked when he came to and found himself tied to a chair.

Jinxx sighed, as if he hadn't been looking forward to this part. He pulled the rug away from the kitchen table and gripped the edge of it, giving the rolled-up part a push. Jake watched it unroll and felt all the air leave his lungs.

Okay, so maybe the purpose of the rug wasn't to hide Jake's dead body once they were through here. But only because there was already a dead guy rolled up in it.

"What the fuck!?" He couldn't even be ashamed of how his voice had gone high-pitched because, um,  _dead body in his kitchen floor_. The guy didn't look like he'd been dead for long, and there were no visible stab wounds on him or anything, but still. Dead body. In his kitchen. He was never going to be able to cook here again.

"We had a bit of a mishap with a summoning and CC here ended up with his soul separated from his body," Jinxx said matter-of-factly, dragging said body to the middle of the circle he'd drawn. "He's not dead," he added, correctly surmising the new source of Jake's distress. "Nobody's going to end up dead here, okay? I just need some blood and a witness to fix this."

"Oh yeah, yeah. So what, you and your friend went clubbing to pick up a dude so you could get some blood? Why couldn't you provide all of that stuff yourself? And speaking of your friend, is he doing the same thing to Ashley right now that you're doing to me? You got a bunch of other friends that need to be anti-exorcised, or something?" Sarcastic questions were probably not the best way to deal with the terror of coming face to face with either balls-to-the-wall crazy or genuine witches (and Jake was still undecided on which one would be worse) but his supply of fucks to give was rapidly running out here.

"In order: yes, because the ingredients and how they must be collected and used are very specific if you don't want things to go wrong, they're probably just screwing, and no." Jinxx was rifling through Jake's cabinets now, calmly explaining, if it could really be called that, over his shoulder. He came up with a bowl and gave it a once-over before nodding to himself and setting it on the table. "Listen, here's how this is going to go: I'm going to collect some of your blood to use in a... potion, if you want to call it that. I'm going to use it to call CC's spirit back, he'll be fine, and then we'll go and leave you alone. Sound good to you?"

"I... guess?" Jake's head was spinning. He couldn't decide if he should be terrified or angry or just confused. "If you needed someone to help you get stuff, couldn't you have, you know... asked?"

Jinxx raised an eyebrow at him. "If I walked up to you in the club and went, 'Hey, I need your blood to rejoin my friend's soul with his body, want to go back to my place?', would you have kept talking to me?"

"No," Jake admitted. "I would have gotten the hell out of there." Just like he would have gotten the hell out of here long before now, if he wasn't tied to a chair.

"There you go," Jinxx said, as if that explained everything. He picked up the knife and the bowl and walked around to the back of Jake's chair, where his hands were tied. "This will only hurt for a second, okay?" He took Jake's hand and splayed his fingers open, leaving the palm exposed and facing up. Jake opened his mouth to ask another question, and in that split second Jinxx drew the blade of the knife across his palm. It was a shallow cut, but the sting still made him draw in a sharp gasp and try to jerk away. Jinxx kept a firm hold on his hand, squeezing droplets of blood from the cut into the bowl below. When he judged it was enough, he stood and carried the bowl back to the table, setting it down and picking up a roll of bandages and gauze from the miscellaneous supplies he'd dumped there while drawing his circle. "The other one is your chord hand, right?"

"Yeah," Jake muttered. They'd struck up conversation so easily before, once it was established that they were both musicians. Jinxx returned to bandage his hand and he hissed softly as the gauze pad pressed against the cut.

Jinxx patted his shoulder as if to tell him that he'd done a good job and returned to the bowl and whatever it was on the table that he was going to mix in with the blood. "Now for the hard part."

"Oh, good. Wouldn't want to miss that."

Jinxx let out a soft, snorting laugh, and as much as Jake felt like he had a right to be mad at him for all this, he was vividly reminded of the giddy feeling that had struck him when Jinxx first threw him that smile in the dim lighting of the nightclub.

He watched Jinxx work in silence for a while, both because he  _was_ sort of intrigued by it and because he didn't want to look at CC's apparently soulless-but-not-dead body on the floor. Jinxx took dried plants, bits of powdered mineral, chips of animal bone, and mixed them in, lips moving silently as if he was repeating a recipe to himself. He poured the resulting mixture into a saucepan and put it on the stove, turning his back to Jake and leaving him with nothing to watch except Jinxx's ass in those jeans.

They were a flattering pair of jeans, it had to be said.

"So," he began, before he'd consciously made the decision to break the silence. Jinxx didn't turn around, but gave a "Hm?" over his shoulder to show that he was listening.

"Did you have to have a specific person for this? Why did you... I mean, why... why me?"

"Because you're nice." Jinxx checked the mixture in the saucepan before pulling the other chair out from the table and sitting down to face him. "You know all that 'inner beauty' bullshit self-help books are always spouting? Some of that is actually true, sort of. Good people have good magic in them."

"Oh." Whatever Jake had been expecting, it wasn't that. It was kind of... nice? "So, did we have to fuck to make this work, or was that just a bonus?"

There was that smile again. "That was just because I felt like it." The "potion" in the saucepan had started to boil, and Jinxx stood to turn the stove off and pour the mix back into the bowl. Jake tried to ignore the coppery scent of his own blood being cooked like someone's soup. At least Jinxx was courteous enough to put the pan in the sink.

Jake no longer bothered to hide his interest as Jinxx knelt by CC and lifted his head to pour the mixture in the bowl into his mouth. He was speaking in a voice too low for Jake to hear clearly, and what snatches of words he did get didn't sound like English. Jake was struck by the darkness and intensity of his eyes, unconsciously leaning forward in his chair as he watched. 

Jinxx finished his incantation quietly but firmly, watching CC expectantly. And...

Nothing happened.

Something like disappointment settled in Jake's stomach, followed by a fresh curl of fear. He'd bought it, he realized. He'd accepted the whole witchcraft angle when Jinxx was probably just some random crazy, and he wasn't going to take kindly to his little experiment failing.

It had just occurred to him that he should probably be really trying to get out of the chair when CC sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and opened his eyes.

"Aw, dude," he said. "What did you put in my mouth? That's fucked up." He sat up, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

"That's what I've been saying since I woke up too," Jake informed him. He felt weirdly numb; possibly a side effect of having just had his blood used for some magical purpose but more likely shock. Nothing in sex ed told you about what to do when you hooked up with a witch and got coerced into participating in rituals.

"Oh, hey," CC said, seeming to just now notice Jake's presence. If he was surprised at the fact that Jake was tied to a chair and half-naked, he didn't show it. Speaking of which...

"Uh, can I be untied now? Do I have to promise not to call the cops on you or something? Because I'm pretty sure they'd take me straight to the psych ward if I tried to explain any of this."

"You'd be surprised what people are willing to believe," Jinxx said. Still, he stepped up behind the chair and carefully undid the binds, curling the rope neatly around his hand and setting it with the rest of his supplies. "And thank you, Jake. Really. I wouldn't have been able to help CC without you."

CC nodded. "Oh yeah, man. Getting sucked out of your body is the worst. Spirit world is boring as hell. Or well, not  _hell_ hell, but you get my point."

"Yeah," Jake agreed, partly because he did get it and partly because he'd decided to just take whatever else tonight was going to throw at him in stride.

It was nearing five a.m. when Jake found himself falling back into bed, still reeling from what he'd experienced. CC had raided his fridge before he and Jinxx left. Jake had decided not to call him out on it, considering the guy had just gotten back from an involuntary spirit journey.

Jinxx gave him his phone number. He kept it.

He woke again some time around noon when Ashley called him to ask how things had gone the night before. Also to tell him that Andy (Jinxx and CC's friend, also known as the guy with the eyes) could see the future. And make no mistake, they had one hell of a future ahead of them.

Jake didn't know whether Ashley meant himself and Andy, or all five of them together, or what. But he had a good feeling, and good things led to good magic.

Or something like that.


End file.
